Roscigno

The name is said to come from the nightingale, which in the local dialect is russignuolo. The village, for its part, has walked: landslides forced it to rebuild itself three times, in the seventeenth century, in the eighteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth, and for that they call it the village that walks. The last move was by law: two acts, of 1902 and 1908, obliged the inhabitants to leave the old centre and build a new one a little further on, at the place called Piano.

Roscigno Vecchia has stayed where it was, empty and untouched, a nineteenth-century rural village with its square and its church, now declared an eco-museum. For years one person alone lived there: Giuseppe Spagnuolo, who died in January 2024, and who spent his days in the deserted streets and acted as guide to the tourists passing through. Two kilometres from the village, on Monte Pruno, there was a large Oenotrian and Lucanian settlement: in 1938 a princely tomb was found there, and its grave goods are now in the archaeological museum of Salerno.